Posts tagged mwc2014

Despite Qualcomm's odd stance on octa-core and 64-bit in the past, the company has clearly changed its mind since last week's launch of its Snapdragon 615, which includes both features. Qualcomm's marketing VP Tim McDonough, who briefly spoke to us after his meeting with Oppo at MWC, admitted that...

You may have already followed the announcement of Sony's Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z2 Tablet last week, but did you know that they are also the first mobile devices to feature MHL 3.0? For those who haven't caught up, this standard allows 4K video output -- over a bandwidth of 6 Gbps -- from a micro-US...

You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Clic...

In Barcelona we all tried to thrive
And strove to not imbibe too many beers
When Samsung trotted out the GS5
Then shortly after highlighted new Gears.
Mozilla's and Ubuntu's phones seemed cheap,
Along with some of Waterloo's new wares,
But Sony's flagship stuff's atop the heap
And Blackphon...

Now that Mobile World Congress is behind us and we've left the sunny Mediterranean to go back to our rainy or snowy abodes, it's time to reflect on the show that was. We walked through miles and miles of hallways and battled thousands of roller bags and suits to find the show's best and worst. The...

Of all the phone manufacturers out there, Samsung seems to have a particular talent for creating an anticlimax. Our first thought when holding the Galaxy S5 was that we'd been through all this before a year ago, with the equally underwhelming launch of the GS4. Our disappointment jibed with the re...

Samsung's device lineup may still be heavily dominated by Android, but change is in the air. Tizen, the open-source OS it jointly develops with Intel, powers the company's three new Gear wearables, and smartphones are coming later this year. We got the chance to play with Samsung's latest Tizen pho...

For the past several years, improvements in smartphone cameras have followed the "more megapixels" mantra. Samsung's Galaxy S5 is up from 13 to 16 megapixels; Sony's new Xperia Z2 packs a 20.7-megapixel Exmor model; and Nokia's Lumia 1020 with PureView is a 41-megapixel monster. However, Google's ...

The Ubuntu Touch smartphone OS has come a long way, but it still has further to plod before it's ready for market - all Canonical will tell us that it hopes to see an Ubuntu phone before the end of this year. Nevertheless, now that some phone manufacturers are on board with the project, we've been...

After Lenovo's recent purchase, questions immediately arose surrounding Motorola's planned device launches for 2014. In a Twitter Q&A surrounding the events at Mobile World Congress, the handset maker revealed that the next version of its popular Moto X is coming in "late summer." Unfortunatel...

It's only been a week since Gionee debuted its super thin Elife S5.5 Android phone in China, but luckily for us, the company also brought it along to MWC. After playing with the 5.55mm-thick device for some time, we were left very impressed with its build quality. The aluminum frame was nicely mac...

Wacom has been pushing into the world of mobile for a while, and its efforts have just culminated in a pretty bold move: A single, cross-platform standard for sharing handwritten notes and sketches between users, regardless of whether they're using a stylus or a finger, an iPhone or a PC, an app o...

It's safe to say that in 2014, we're not short of smartwatches. But how many do you actually want to wear? That's a question that manufacturers are finally starting to ask themselves. It's also a question that Creoir -- who designs products for brands like Nokia and Jolla -- is trying to answer wi...

One camera. Two separate lenses. That's the conundrum raised by leaked images of HTC's forthcoming M8 smartphone, which is rumored to bring some interesting new imaging features that go far beyond mere 3D. But what could those features be? For an answer, we turned to a startup called Corephotonics...

Goophone's a bit like a covers band that just happens to make knock-off smartphones. Not content with just plundering better artists' catalogs, the company has apparently managed to copy the Galaxy S5 in under two days. The Goophone S5, yep, has a 5-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 display, paired with a 2GHz ...

Among the many frustrations we had with Samsung's first smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, was the limited number of apps available for it. While the company offered premium access to select partners, it never came out with a software development kit (SDK) for anyone and everyone to submit their own app...

Samsung has been hinting at new Exynos processors for both a Galaxy S5 variant and the Galaxy Note 3 Neo, and today it's detailing the two CPUs in earnest. The GS5's expected chip, the Exynos 5422, is primarily a speed bump of the eight-core Exynos 5 Octa we saw last July; it boosts the clock spee...

Locking down those credit cards while globe-trotting is always a chief concern. Today at Mobile World Congress, MasterCard and Syniverse announced a joint effort to ease the fears of travelers. The pair is working on a pilot program that will only allow card-based transactions when a user's mobile...

Jolla's got a big problem, and the company knows it. The small Finnish startup has grand plans to upend the smartphone paradigm with its modular phone and unique gesture-based OS, but that foreign approach has left some users confused. The MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS relies entirely on swipe navigat...

Exactly a year to the day after it first announced its Knox security solution, Samsung's returned to Mobile World Congress with news that it's making it even easier to secure and manage Galaxy devices. With the launch of Knox 2.0 today, Samsung's changed the way the platform handles Google Play ap...